Re: Internet Me

Mark_Reichert@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
angrie.woman wrote:
Yeah, let's let them run our health care too.

Medicare is better run than the incredible mish-mash health insurance
industry and at much lower cost.



Also: http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/columnist/shapiro/2004-12-02-hype_x.htm

WASHINGTON — Here is a clip-and-save fact that symbolizes America's long-term financial dilemma: According to government estimates, the ultimate drain from the new Medicare prescription-drug benefit will be greater than the current national debt.

That's right. All prior unbalanced federal budgets will someday be topped by a single pre-election program for Medicare recipients.

Like most governmental numbers, this one requires a little explanation. The figure is based on a 75-year projection by the actuaries who scrutinize the Medicare program. While health care costs are notoriously difficult to forecast, this prediction assumes that the prescription-drug program, which has huge gaps in its coverage, will never be expanded.

This red-ink reality was one of the budgetary horror stories brandished at a conference Thursday sponsored by the Government Accountability Office. Comptroller General David Walker, who heads the GAO, assembled more than 60 experts (including former Federal Reserve chairman Paul Volcker, former Commerce secretary Pete Peterson and Josh Bolten, the director of the Office of Management and Budget) for a discussion of the gathering threat caused by the government's fiscal irresponsibility.

With the election over and no participant quoted without permission, this GAO forum featured a candid bipartisan dialogue that would be impossible in a more politicized environment. The dominant theme, expressed by Republicans and Democrats, was a sense of fatalism that the debt problem would grow much worse before politicians are galvanized to take action.

The crux of the problem is that voters have yet to feel any pain from red-ink budgets and unfunded future bills for Social Security and Medicare. With interest rates at near-historic lows and inflation minimal, Americans do not feel that their jobs or their purchasing power are menaced by this abstract threat.

We are a nation of free-spending consumers. Asian powers such as China and Japan have economies dependent on exports and are eager to supply us with a cornucopia of goods. As long as the weak dollar avoids spiraling into a fatal tailspin, this symbiotic we-buy-and-they-sell system will keep going for the short-term future.

Sure, there will be an inevitable day of reckoning with baby boomers clamoring for their full Social Security and Medicare benefits as interest on the fast-increasing national debt takes a huge bite out of the federal budget. But by then, in all likelihood, George W. Bush will be preoccupied with his presidential library, and many current members of Congress will have moved on to lucrative second careers as Washington lobbyists.

Pollster Dan Yankelovich described America as "a country in emotional denial" over the coming debt crisis. Part of this head-in-the-sand attitude, I believe, stems from the inability of ordinary Americans to respond to statistic-filled articles about the extent of the nation's unfunded future obligations. (That is why I have tried to write this column without resorting to any of the standard confusion-inducing numbers).

Some of this failure of comprehension is rooted in the way that words like "billions" and "trillions" look similar on a printed page. If the English language is at fault, the blame ultimately falls on everyone's favorite villain, the French. Based on a rough study of etymology, these words for big numbers were popularized in 17th-century France and were based on the 14th-century coinage of "million."

Things might be different if "trillion" actually sounded like it was a thousand times bigger than "billion." Walker puckishly suggested using animal names to connote these differences in scale, with a dog symbolizing a million, a horse representing a billion and a T-Rex dinosaur standing in for a trillion. By this calculus, the nation's unfunded liabilities are already equal to 45 dinosaurs.

The rhetoric that accompanies high-minded discussions of the deficit has grown shopworn. Is any voter convinced by earnest appeals for "fiscal discipline"? You would have to be a masochist to believe that such a budgetary procedure would be fun.

Let's also retire the standard politician's lament that we are placing an unendurable debt burden "on our children and our children's children." America is a child-centered society, but parents are more likely to prefer increased spending for education to green-eyeshade arithmetic.

Former Minnesota Democratic congressman Tim Penny pinpointed a political problem when he said, "There is not much incentive in the system to admit the obvious: There are trade-offs. If you want X, you can't have Y."

Bush and Congress had no problem with telling the voters that we can afford a war in Iraq and a prescription-drug benefit. These days, sacrifice seems limited to soldiers dispatched to Iraq and then forced to serve additional tours of duty.

Next month, the president is likely to flesh out his proposals for the partial privatization of Social Security in his Inaugural Address and his State of the Union speech to Congress. The truth-in-budgeting test for the president will be whether he will admit that his plan for individual accounts will be accompanied by huge transition costs. The political temptation will be to mask his Social Security arithmetic in a fiscal fog.

That, of course, would be a sure-fire way to add new dinosaurs to the government's future fiscal obligations. And as the nation's children learn in elementary school, dinosaurs ultimately became extinct because there was not enough food to feed their gargantuan appetites.
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Relevant Pages

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